“Oh, they are loucos”, they thought – some even said. “Portugal and Greece are so far apart. Impossible to find common ground”…

Imagine what people like them, with raised brows, will say now that we are talking about a triangle (not that of the… Bermuda): Portugal, Braziland Greece. Well, Portugal and Brazil, OK, the relation is obvious: former metropolis and colony; but… Greece?!!

I can say that our collaborative results astonished even us! Even me, I should add, that I have been researching this field for years, arriving to the conclusion that civilization, culture, is the result of give and take, of exchange. I have also shown in my radio programs that lands so far apart, like – say – India and Iberia, have been interconnected for thousands of years, since ancient times… Well, when the Hellenes say “ancient”, they mean BCE (before the common era), or BC (before Christ), if you like.

All these ideas were further reinforced when Amélia and I started working on Periplus. Of course, there are some “dark spots” still now; questions that remain unanswered. A big question for me e.g. is: how can Amélia, a Portuguese born in Mozambique, compose in an ancient style? You see, all three ancient Greek themes we have in Periplus (Seikilos’ Epitaph, the First Delphic Hymnto Apollo, and Mesomedes’ Hymn to Nemesis) were included because of her own compositions that reminded me of the ancient Hellenic songs mentioned above. It’s very strange, indeed.

However, apart from these “dark spots”, which will always challenge us to come up with some satisfactory answers, we were able to assemble the rest of the puzzle rather easily. And when our Periplus was released, I could say:

“You know, the links are there, waiting for us to uncover them. One only needs to search, methodically, of course, with a proper compass”, a bússula, as we say in Greek or bússola as you say in Portuguese.(a)

(a) We have the same word coming from Greek (pyxos > pyxis-pyxida > buxis-buxida > box, boîte, and bussola), with the plant pyxos (> boxwood) as a starting point; its hard, compact and durable wood has been used since ancient times to construct vessels, such as pyxides, and also musical (string and wind) instruments. Note that its seeds are kept in a capsule also called pyxis. Indeed, who among the non-specialists would ever imagine that the English box is of a Greek origin?

Antikythera Mechanism

THE GREEK PENINSULA AND ARCHIPELAGO was not a beginning in world history. The Hellenes received the wisdom from the Orient (Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Egypt) and turned it into science;(b) it was a great feat! And what they left behind was a marvelous literature – uma literatura maravilhosa, indeed! Thus the Hellenic civilization became the foundation of the Occidental cultures.

(b) There can be no great civilization without equivalent technology. A marvel in this domain is the Antikythera mechanism, the earliest analogue computer designed to calculate astronomical positions. Dated to ca 100 BCE, it was recovered in 1901 from a wreck between the Peloponnese and Crete, but its significance and complexity were not understood until a century later. Devices of a comparable level would reappear in the 14th century CE in Europe, with the construction of astronomical clocks. Professor Michael Edmunds of Cardiff University, who led a 2006 study of the mechanism, said:“This device is just extraordinary, the only thing of its kind. The design is beautiful, the astronomy is exactly right. The way the mechanics are designed just makes your jaw drop… In terms of historic and scarcity value, I have to regard this mechanism as being more valuable than theMona Lisa.”

Victoria, the sole ship of Magellan’s fleet
to complete the periplus of the world
(detail from a map by Ortelius, 1590)

The extant peripli (plural of periplus) took place in the Mediterranean, the Indian and the Atlantic oceans. Herodotus also wrote about a periplus of Africa by Phoenicians on behalf of an Egyptian pharaoh. A Greek from Alexandria, Egypt, described the Indian Ocean coasts of eastern Africa and India. Pytheas, from the Hellenic colony of Massalia (modern Marseille, France), voyaged north to the British Isles and Scandinavia and concluded a periplus of Europe sailing via European rivers from the Baltic to the Black Seas and back to the Mediterranean. There are also people that believe the Minoan Cretans, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Punics, and other ancient peoples sailed to the Americas long before the Vikings, Columbus – or, of course, Magellan, who attempted a periplus of the world but was not fortunate enough to conclude it.

Therefore, these voyages started long before recorded history, in the Bronze Age. There are some historical clues that the Minoans in the time of their thalassocracy travelled as far as Cornwall, Britain, in search of tin – or else they obtained this important metal at ports of southern Gaul. Tin is a necessary component of bronze (± 90% copper plus ± 10% tin). There were vast quantities of copper in the Mediterranean. Cyprus e.g. was full of copper and the name Cyprus comes from copper (and vice versa). But tin? There were very few places in the Mediterranean with tin and in limited quantities.

The Minoans, and later the Greeks and the Phoenicians, sailed initially to Iberia that was rich in these minerals. The Andalusians probably led the Cretans to Galicia, Brittany and Cornwall: they knew the way… All these places, especially Cornwall, had massive tin deposits. There, close to Galicia or even Cornwall, were the so-called Cassiterides Nesoe, the Tin Isles (cassíteros is tin in Greek). Herodotus and other historians write also about the links of the Hellenes and Phoenicians with Tartessos, at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, and many people nowadays correlate the legendary Tartessos with the elusive Atlantis…

Andalusia: Tartessos, identified with Sanlúcar de Barrameda (?) by the cartographer, and Gadir-Gadeira-Gades-Cádiz, a Phoenician colony on three islands with Greek names (Erytheia, Kotinoussa and Antipolis), while its patron, Melqart, was a lookalike of Heracles, the city’s founder, according to a Hellenic myth…

AS A STARTING POINT THIS RESEARCH had some very simple questions:

One of the two full-size Greek bronzes of nude bearded warriors, the Riace Bronzes, cast about 460–450 BCE, recovered in 1972, considered as one of the symbols of Calabria

• Where did the Bronze Age Mediterranean find tin to produce bronze?

• Who were the established maritime traders of the time to bring this most crucial metal to the Mediterranean and where did they find it?

Our conclusion is that certain needs motivated the humans to live together, to communicate, to exchange. That’s how society was born, the cities were created, the classes and division of labour emerged and writing was invented. The interaction concerned material needs but at the same time transformed the people that worked together exchanging also ideas and ideals, a process that led to the birth of civilization, of culture.

IT IS NOT SO OBVIOUS but we have something like a periplus in other human endeavours, too. Music was born together with speech. In an advanced stage, in ancient Hellas, music was either instrumental or song. Poetry in classical Greece was inconceivable without music. The two arts got… divorce later, in the 4th century BCE. However, either before or after, a periplus was (and still is) needed to combine sounds with words, and to express the meaning of the words through sounds. Something similar also happens in a translation: then the periplus concerns two languages. It is the voyage of a text, its meaning and style, content and form, while it is adapted in order to start breathing in another language environment…

Dante, in his Inferno, cites another version of Odysseus’ descent into the underworld with no return. The king of Ithaca, he writes, went out of the Pillars of Hercules and sailed south, crossed the Equator, continued voyaging for months, until he reached a bay with a big mountain. Then a tornado sank his boat.

I don’t know why, but I think this bay with the big mountain is… the River of January:Rio de Janeiro! I would really love to confirm that…

• The modern Greek Homerist Ioannis Kakridis argues that the Odyssey is a work of poetry and not a travel log (or a navigator’s periplus). According to W. B. Stanford, Cape Maleas and the nearby island of Cythera, where Odysseus met storms (Odyssey, book 9), are “the last clearly identifiable places in his wanderings. After this he leaves the sphere of Geography and enters Wonderland.” (Wandering in Wonderland)…

Nevertheless, due to the great impact of the Homeric epics, the attempt to create the “Geography of the Odyssey” started as early as Hesiod, who must have been Homer’s contemporary, and by the Hellenistic period, the literature on the subject had really thrived. There were even disagreements among the scholars whether Odysseus’ wanderings were confined within the Mediterranean or if they expanded into the Atlantic – indicating that for them the ocean was not a “terra” (mare) incogita.

Other scholars, however, turned against this euhemerism –(d) some of them even against the great rhapsode. The mythographer-grammarian Apollodorus of Athens (2nd century BCE) wrote that Homer imagined the wanderings as having taken place in a kind of fairyland in the Atlantic. Strabo (1st centuries BCE-CE) considered that at least Ogygia and Scheria-Phaeacia, the islands of Calypso and Nausicaa respectively, were “imagined in fantasy” as being in the Atlantic.

(d) From the mythographer of Sacred History,Euhemerus: the view that the gods have been deified humans and that the myths have a historical basis.

Plutarch (1st-2nd centuries CE) also placed Ogygia in the Atlantic, and specifically west of Britain. Additionally he repeated what Plato had described as a continent on the other side of the Atlantic, claiming that from this continent Ogygia was about 900 kilometres distant. The German astronomer and mathematician Kepler (1571 – 1630) estimated that “the great continent” was America and attempted to locate Calypso’s island.

In her work entitled The Wine Dark Sea, the American Henriette Mertz argued that Circe’s island is Madeira, Calypso’s island one of the Azores, while the intervening travels record a discovery of North America: Scylla and Charybdis are in the Bay of Fundy, in Nova Scotia, Canada, while Scheria is in the Caribbean.

Enrico Mattievich, an Italian-Peruvian retired Professor of Physics from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (where our festival took place), “brought” Odysseus to South America, proposing that his journey to the Underworld actually took place there. The river Acheron is the Amazon, he argued in his Journey to the Mythological Inferno (1992). After a long voyage upstream Odysseus met the spirits of the dead at the confluence of the rivers Marañon and Ucayali – the starting point of the Amazon.

Odysseus may not have been the first Hellene to go down there: according to Mertz, a century before the Trojan War and the Odyssey, in the 13th century BCE, the Argonauts travelled across the Atlantic Ocean, down the east coast of South America, past the mouth of the Amazon and Rio de Janeiro to the Río de la Plata of Argentina, and, following it upstream, reached the altiplano of Bolivia arriving at Colchis or Tiwanaku, where the Golden Fleece was kept. Centuries later Tiwanaku became the religious, cosmological, cultural and commercial centre of a pre-Columbian empire that extended around Lake Titicaca in present-day western Bolivia, southern Peru and northern Chile from 300 to 1150 CE. But this area must have been inhabited as early as 1500 BCE.

Some writers interpret the Homeric epics as “British ballads” or “Viking sagas”. The Belgian Théophile Cailleux suggested in his Pays atlantiques décrits par Homère (Atlantic lands described by Homer, 1878) that Troy was situated in East Anglia, on the heights outside Cambridge known as the Gog Magog Hills (rather far from the sea); while Ithaca, he believed, should be sought in southern Andalusia, somewhere between Jerez and Cádiz, in the delta of the Guadalete (where another Trojan War hero, Menestheus, supposedly settled: see Chronicle 7). But Cailleux was unlucky: some time after his book was published, Heinrich Schliemann triumphantly proved that Troy and Mycenae existed as powerful cities at the right time and in the right place to have fought a Trojan War such as the epics describe. Thus there was no great thirst for geohistorical speculation then in the market.

More than a century later, the Dutch Iman Wilkens presented the same idea again. His book Where Troy Once Stood (1990) takes us to the same hills that Cailleux pinpointed, but with the screenplay somewhat modified: the Trojan War was fought around 1200 BCE between groups of Celts, says Wilkens. Those living in Cambridgeshire were attacked by fellow Celts from the Continent to win access to the very profitable tin mines in Cornwall. He further hypothesizes that the Sea Peoples (see Chronicles 3-5) were Celts who settled in Greece and the Aegean as Achaeans and Pelasgians, bringing with them the oral poems that were translated and written down in Hellenic around 750 BCE, forming the basis of the Iliad and Odyssey. He locates Scylla and Charybdis at present day St Michael’s Mount, at the tip of Cornwall, he moves a bit Ithaca from Guadalete to Cádiz, while the topography of the LaestrygonianTelepylos(“Far-off port”) looks to him similar to that of Havana. Alas! His nationalism turned out to be his Achilles’ heel: “It appears that Homer’s Greek contains a large number of loan words from western European languages, more often from Dutch rather than English, French or German”, he thoughtlessly wrote, speaking of tongues that have not existed until at least 1000 years after Homer…(e)

(e) If one takes Cailleux and Wilkens for granted, the Trojans left Britain after the war to settle in Italy, but three generations later they returned to found the British nation! Historia Regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain), written around 1136 by Geoffrey of Monmouth, begins with the Trojan Aeneas who, according to Roman legend, settled in Italy after the war. But when his great-grandson Brutus was banished, he started wandering and was finally directed by the goddess Diana (Artemis) to settle on the island Albion in the western ocean. He named the island Britain after himself, defeated the giants who were the only inhabitants there, and on the banks of the Thames he established his capital, Troia Nova, which was later renamed London.

In The Baltic Origins of Homer’s Epic Tales (1995), the Italian Felice Vinci assumed that the Achaeans were a Baltic people at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE, coming to Greece around the 16th century, after the Trojan War that took place in the 18th century BCE, and bringing their traditional oral sagas to the Aegean. The islands of Odysseus’ kingdom, Ithaca, Dulichium, Cephalonia, and Zakynthos, would correspond with islands in the Danish archipelago of South Funen, and Troy with Toija in SW Finland; the Hellespont could not be identified with Dardanelles, but with the Gulf of Finland; Mycenae would have stood in the same place as modern Copenhagen; and Odysseus’ voyage would have taken place along the coasts of Norway: Ogygia could be identified with one of the Faroe Islands (among Britain, Scandinavia and Iceland); Scheria, home of the Phaeacians, with the environs of Bergen; Circe’s island, and the places she describes (the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis) may be placed in the Lofoten archipelago of northern Norway; and Aeolus’ island in the Shetland archipelago, NE of Scotland. According to Vinci, the same region is the setting of other Hellenic mythological tales, such as the Argonauts’ voyage. Referring to Plato’s dialogue Critias, he maintains that Athens used to rise formerly on a flat fertile zone in the Baltic, perhaps near the town of Karlskrona in southern Sweden.

Incan Golden Solar disc, used as a star map.It was lost during the Conquista.

Regarding the background of Homer’s epics, the FlemishKarel Jozef de Graeve, in his République des Champs Elysées (Republic of the Elysian Fields, 1806), pointed out the area around the Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt delta. Finally, the French Gilbert Pillot, in Le Code secret de l’Odyssée (The Secret Code of the Odyssey, 1969), “saw” Odysseus crossing the Pillars of Heracles and voyaging in the Atlantic, initially to Morocco, the Canaries and Madeira, and then heading north to Ireland, Scotland and Iceland.

More extreme views have occasionally surfaced that the whole geography of the Iliad and the Odyssey can be mapped on the coasts of the northern Atlantic. According to this, Troy was in southern England, Telemachus’ journey took him to Andalusia, while Odysseus wandered around the Atlantic coast. Some others turned recently their eyes to the sky arguing that the Homeric geography is to be found there, and that the Iliad and Odyssey can be decoded as a star map. What we will hear next, I suppose, would be that the Trojan War was actually a Star War…